Archive for April, 2006

I left the real world a while ago. It was rather pleasent. I just stopped reading the newspapers, stopped watching the television news, and figured they can all go to hell in a handbasket however they like. So far the kind men at the power company have kept the power on, and my friends at Blarg have kept the network connection up. Oil prices seem to be climbing but as long as I can get enough solar panels to keep my computers running when the power company starts charging twice as much a kwh, I should be okay.

Or will I? I’ve had thoughts that bordered on the darkest insanity I know.. this repeated anger that I was created without my permission and then forced to live in a world that requires me to eat and subjects me to miserable conditions unless I work – basically enslave myself to other people and other people’s priorities.

It’s frustrating. I want to build electric vehicles and write music. (and probably fiction, and probably fingerpaint for all of that). Now that I understand that all you have to do to be omnipotent is be a number line, my patience with this situation is waning, to put it mildly.

Did I ask to be created? I can’t remember it if I did – but it wouldn’t astonish me to discover that I in fact somewhere back in the depths of time thought that being a human would be a lot of fun. And yes, it’s definately had it’s high points.

But I’m not looking forward to the slow decay of years, and I’ve had enough pain already, thank you very much, I really don’t need more.

I went to a bipolar support group meeting today. If nothing else, it’s reassuring to note that I’m not the only frustrated one, nor the only one who thinks I’m stuck inside a system that often makes no sense at all or is counterproductive.

I lack enough power to make it through the flight. I did get a chance to (via my cell phone) get the address of the hotel, so there’s nothing critical not happening.

I can’t keep track of what day it is. I think 27.

My life has been exhausting lately. I keep hoping things will settle down to a more managable pace, but as of yet it hasn’t happened.

Met with my lawyer today. Well, not really my lawyer because he’s leaving the firm in a week. But he took my information, radiated general legal competence, and I have high hopes for this firm actually figuring out a solution to my legal woes. Or at least, I can hope.

I’ve figured out why my dad saying the universe doesn’t owe me a living angers me: I didn’t ask to be created, and I am not permitted [or at least strongly discouraged] from ceasing to exist. Given that these things are true, it would seem that the universe does indeed owe me a living. And he is directly responsable for that.

I keep wondering.. in some previous life, prior to now, did I ask to be here, to watch friend after friend die, to experience system after system of my body failing, to experience pain and loss and suffering? Is it ever moral to have children, given the dark sides of the world that we are bringing them into? Is it moral to expect our children to work, given that they didn’t ask to exist? To ask them to give up their dreams in order to work on projects they don’t care about or even actively dislike? (i.e. parking meters – if I could make every parking meter in the world dissapear by waving a magic wand, I’d start waving. Actually, that probably applies to every form of currency as well. I’m not against money as a basic concept for energy exchange, but I am getting awfully sick of some of the fruits of capitolism as it’s currently implimented. Starting out with, why do all of the professionals I’m seeing, who don’t actually have any more hours of training than I do, get paid more than I do? In the meantime, why does my friend Tory, who’s every bit as worthwhile as a human, get paid less? It’s sick, people, and it needs to be put out of it’s misery. Especially in the case of CEOs who draw millions of dollars of pay.)

My basic choice was either stay under parents who tried to apply the morals their religion specified on me, despite the fact that I rejected that religion – or get out and work, at that time for $2/hr. I chose, obviously, to get out and work. But I find that on some level I harbor some anger for the whole situation.

I feel kind of like humans are intrensically selfish. Having children, for example, is a selfish act – most of the time you want them to conform to your ideals of what a ideal human is, which leads to many fights between parents and children. I don’t think that parents should have any authority over children. But then, I reject all authority in general unless it is operating in a advisary capacity. You all may have the might to throw me in jail, beat me, kill me, deprive me of my possessions, or in general make my life miserable. That doesn’t mean that it is right to do any of those things, any more than it would be right for me to do them to any of you. This would seem self-evident.

If I could destroy every government on earth without hurting any of the humans that are the component parts of those governments, I would probably do that also.

Can you tell I’m in a bad mood today?

Every government should come with a built in mechanism by which the governed can request a re-authoring or update of the government and governing documents. THis isn’t saying that any of the people involved in the government should be hurt, although in many cases they should be removed from power. However, every government suffers from some basic weaknesses. Any time one human attempts to order another human about, bad things are going to happen.

I can’t decide if I’m green, liberetarian, or anarchist. I have a little bit of each in me – for example, I don’t think it is correct for me to take actions which poisen the enviornment that we all have to live in, or use up resources wantonly that our children and their children and their children will need. But in terms of drug laws, and ‘blue code’ laws, and laws concerning who can and can’t marry, and things like that, I’m strongly anarchist. You shouldn’t be able to tell me I can’t marry someone that is the same gender that I am, marry multiple people, or marry my dog, cat, or dolphin. And you should be ashamed of yourself for trying, those of you out there who support such insanity.

I’ve been thinking of a project – a web site that allowed members of the internet community at large to vote on passages from the bible. Basically, the idea is, there is some good content there. However, there’s a lot of passages that I could, honestly, do without reading. There’s a lot of darkness, negativity, genocide, etc. I want to see a book that contains reasonable advice for life, ajusted for modern technology (birth control, condoms, etc) and cutting out all sexism, agism, genderism, sexual-orientation-ism, and in general all of the text that offends my egalitarian beliefs. I’m not demanding that anyone read this tome, but I think it would be neat to have a community resource that enabled it to be authored.

One possibility I’ve thought of is dumping the bible into a wiki, and then publishing the location via google and sitting back to watch the fun. But I’m not sure that this would achive what I’m trying to achive, so somewhat better tuned software might be in order.

I admit, it’s not a huge priority. But I wish *someone* would do it.

Okay, that’s enough of my bad attitude for the moment.

Actually, one more comment. I seem to have different opinions on some subjects every day. So all of the above text is subject to change without notice, at least in terms of my attitudes about the world.

Ow my aching back. Today is another back-hurts day. Had nightmares all last night.. in one, I was trying to get through a tunnel and there was broken glass everywhere and it was embedding in my skin. In others, other horrible things happening.. in general, it was not a good night. I also kept Kayti up with my tossing and turning, which is pretty horrible.

But, it’s day 25. Halfway to my high water mark, still doing fine. I was put in temptation’s way, in terms of having a cig, last night and managed to resist. I don’t know that I’ve given up cigs forever, but I’m pretty clear on them being among the things that I’m not touching this (year – 25 days). And really, I haven’t been smoking any to speak of for a couple of years now.

One year still seems just as long as it did when I started this adventure, but at least I’ve got lots of stuff to keep me busy.

Day 22. Naturally it would have to happen that Gateway would crash while I’m out of town. I’ve asked my friend Tory to reboot it, and hopefully he will.

Yesterday was a awful day on all fronts. Woke up at 10:00a, went down to the clients site, wrote a disaster recovery plan, and pulled a first-year-sysadmin stupidity stunt.

I was using text mode on a linux console and switching back and forth between about four consoles. I forgot that one of the consoles had been sshed to another host, and when a process hung because of some incorrect settings, I did a killall – on the wrong machine. Unfortunately, the process was a dependancy for the production services run on that machine, and so they went down, leaving 300 people without their database. All of whom were in the same building I was.

We restarted the database (took about 10 minutes) and ostensibly no data was lost. But I still feel awful. THe boss didn’t even yell at me – just said ‘you know what you did..’

Day 21 begins. I’m at the customer’s site. No one else is here yet. I think this is the first time I’ve ever been the first one into the office. Yay for drugs.

(For those of you who haven’t been following, my psychiatric nurse, who I’ve been seeing for a bit under a month, hath prescribed me a sleeping pill, Lunestra, which allows me to correct for when my clock slips against the sun. This has been a bit of a relevation in my life because historically, there have been times of every month in which I’m unable to wake up before 1p, then 2p, then 3p, etc. When I was younger, I just had to stay up until 4a and sleep until 1p or so because that’s the only cycle that my body would hold at all. Now, with the help of a little coffee on the hard days, I seem to be able to hold any cycle I want. I’m not even sure what to do with this yet, but it does make waking up at 10a a whole lot easier.

1) Any religion that claims that it is the One True Way, and followers of all other religions are going to hell: Automatic disqualification.
2) Any religion that claims war is desirable: Automatic disqualification
3) Negative points for:
i) Suggesting sex is evil, sinful, or bad.
ii) Suggesting sexist, racist, genderist, age-ist, or sexual-orientation-ist beliefs or thoughts
iii) Encouraging hatred, division,
4) Bonus points for
i) Short source code.
ii) Not claiming something that may be false-to-fact i.e. God having the right to judge me. He may have the ability – but might does not make right.
iii) Forgiveness, openmindedness, sharing, caring, love, peace, freedom, beauty, respect, unity, in general attributes that I consider positive
iv) Finding a way to operate that doesn’t require donations or enforcing tithing in the source code or whatever.
v) Encouraging divirsity, cross training, hybrid vigor
vi) OPen and accepting to the shell-shocked

Suggestions? Hmm. We have: Unitarians. They seem on the surface to be pretty safe: they’re all about little dogma and short source code. We have Bhuddists. I’m not sure this qualifies as a religion – it may be more a life philosiphy. However, it fits the hole I’m trying to fill, which is: operating system. I think. Whatever it is that religion is and does.